1,600 of Australia's rejected migrants want to come to America in Obama "dumb" deal

(2013) DOZENS have been charged after rioting asylum seekers left the Nauru immigration detention centre in ruins. http://www.news.com.au/national/dozens-charged-after-nauru-detention-riot/news-story/89cc338cc0b837c348afa93c06686e48

 
This is the “dumb” deal that the Trump Administration has agreed to honor! (See previous posts here)
Supposedly we are taking up to 1,250 rejected asylum seekers (mostly from Muslim countries) that Australia is housing in detention centers at two off-shore locations after they tried to enter Australia illegally.
Thorn in Turnbull’s side! Australian open borders protestors want the detention centers closed and the ‘refugees’ admitted to Australia. Instead over 1,000 will be headed to the US. If we had anyone with guts in Congress they might introduce a bill that requires towns (where they will be placed) are notified of the arrival of Australia’s rejected asylum seekers.

Australia plans to close some of the detention facilities by the end of August and detainees (those not going to your US town) have been offered help to get home.
So what is the “deal” part of this?  For the first time in a long time, we get a bit of news about what Australia is doing for us!  Get this!
Australia is taking some Central Americans presently in Central America (they aren’t even in the US!).  So, I repeat, what are we getting out of the deal?
From 9 News (Australia):

More than 1600 refugees have expressed interest in Australia’s resettlement deal with the United States, which is expected to offer up to 1250 places.

[….]

US officials are vetting refugees on both Manus Island and Nauru to decide who they’ll resettle in America under a one-off deal struck with the federal government.

The immigration department says the US considers refugees as cases, which can comprise a nuclear or extended family group, or an individual.

More than 900 detainees have completed their first interviews with US officials.

[….]

Australia will remove itself from the process on August 31, meaning no more help for refugees returning to their home countries voluntarily from that date forward, senators were told.

Meanwhile, Australia has begun a refugee screening process for seven cases, 30 individuals in total, for potential resettlement from Central America in relation to the US deal.

Let me be clear! First, any Central American migrants presently in Central America are not our problem.
And, consider this!

Australia will take Central American Christians and we get mostly Muslims from the following countries: Iran, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, and Sudan (4 of those countries are on Trump’s original travel ban list).
Adding insult to injury, you pay for all of this!
Trump spotted the dumb deal and called it what it is, but….
POTUS might have had the best instincts during the campaign and shortly after getting in office, but frankly, he is now being rolled by the bureaucrats (and RINOs in Congress).  So much for his business/management acumen!
If this deal goes through, it will be Trump’s dumb deal!

VOA: Deportations of Africans up in 2016; very cool data base

You’ve been hearing the news here and at other news outlets about the stepped-up deportations of Somalis back to their homeland. Many failed asylum seekers are in the mix.
Asylum, for new readers, is, in a way, the other side of the same refugee coin.  Either ‘refugees’ are chosen abroad (usually by the UN these days) and are flown to your towns after supposedly proving that they are persecuted people, or one gets in to the US either illegally or through some temporary legal way and then applies for asylum.

It is difficult (impossible I think) to find photos of Somalis being deported from the US, but there are an unending supply of the Saudi deportations in 2014. Saudi Arabia deported as many as 12,000 Somalis that year. I wonder did Trump ask the Saudis why they don’t take any refugees, including their fellow Muslims?

When the wannabe ‘refugee’ cannot prove his or her case—that they will be persecuted if sent home—then they are supposed to go home!
Conversely, if granted asylum, the migrant is then given all the rights of a ‘refugee’ who was chosen abroad and flown here and will be put on track for US citizenship.
Now, under the Trump Administration, more of those who failed in their asylum bid are being found, detained and sent home.
By the way, this up-tick in deportations is news that should be sent far and wide so as to discourage even more illegal entry and flimsy asylum claims that clog up the courts.
DHS should actually promote an ad campaign around the world trumpeting the news of stepped-up deportations!
Here is Voice of America on the news about Africans, but more importantly I learned about a new and very cool data base.

The United States has expelled about 326 Somali nationals since January.

That number is greater than the total for all Somalis expelled from the country in 2016.

This is the third consecutive year in which the number of Somalis deported by the U.S. government has risen. The rising numbers have increased immigrants’ fears of raids, detentions and deportations.

The deportations of Somali citizens appear to be part of a larger movement, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse*** at Syracuse University. It found that in the first three months of 2017, the U.S. government ordered the deportation of more than 1,200 Africans. Citizens of Ghana, Nigeria, Somalia and Kenya have received the most removal orders.

Recent deportation orders are undoing a ten-year-long trend.

From 2006 to 2016, the number of Africans deported every year fell from 2,100 to about 1,000. If the trend continues, four times more Africans will be deported by the end of this year than during 2016.

Continue reading here.
***Now check out the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse!
Here is one page that I screenshot to show you what interesting stuff is archived there.
On this page we see that there were 19 deportations for reasons of national security in fiscal year 2017 (that fiscal year began on October 1, 2016). You can learn in what states and what courts those cases came from and the nationality of the person to be deported. From this screenshot page, we note that there was one, an Iraqi, ordered by the court in Detroit to be removed.
 

 
This post is filed in our ‘Where to find information’ category.
You can watch that 2014 video about Saudi deportations here: http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Saudi+arabia+deports+Somalis&view=detail&mid=6490B0418567061F00636490B0418567061F0063&FORM=VIRE
 

Temporary refugees sent $1.3 billion back to Haiti in 2015, expert tells Tucker

At first I didn’t think they were going to get to the crux of the matter when Tucker Carlson last night grilled Steve Forester, an attorney for the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, about the upcoming Trump decision about whether to extend Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haiti (we mentioned it here the other day).

Steve Forester of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. Someone should look more deeply into this organization and who funds it. http://www.ijdh.org/

At first they beat around the bush on whether there were any criminals in the Haitian population living legally (temporarily!) in the US, but with continued questioning Forester finally mentioned the ‘R-word’—remittances!
The 50,000 or so Haitians who got in to the US (mostly illegally) prior to the earthquake of 2010 were given a temporary amnesty to stay and work in America and according to Forester in 2015 alone sent $1.3 billion American dollars back to their home country.  That money is propping up Haiti and Forester says the country will be destabilized if those ‘temporary’ legal workers are returned to Haiti!
However, the question I have is: so what about the fact that that money is now lost to the US economy? And are those Haitian workers taking jobs Americans can do (or legal refugees might do)?

You know I mostly write about the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program where of course refugees are also sending billions ‘home,’ but it’s important for you to know about the many other programs for legal immigration, like TPS and the ‘Diversity Visa Lottery’ I told you about here the other day.

Disney wants the Haitian workers!

Forester told Tucker there were 50,000 Haitians here enjoying temporary protected status and have been here 7-15 years. I think Forester completely lost the audience (and Tucker) when he got to his final argument—Disney would lose 500 workers if TPS is not extended—instead of continuing his ‘humanitarian’ shtick.

Tucker commented that maybe Disney would have to pay higher wages to hire new (American) workers!
Watch the whole interview starting at 22:49 and ending at around 28:43.  You might want to watch the segment prior to the Haiti piece about how Mexicans aren’t too happy with all the Central Americans parked in their country who are no longer headed to the US border!
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsoti6j9BO4
 
 
I have a category on Haiti here, with 56 previous posts!

AP perpetuates myth that numbers of refugees arriving in the US under Trump are "plummeting!"

It is really amazing to see how blatantly the mainstream media spins the facts!
Before I even get to the story, once again, here (below) is the data for the last ten plus years (from the Refugee Processing Center). FY2007 and FY2008 are Bush years.  FY2009-2016 are Obama years. And, like it or not, FY2017 is Trump (even though the FY began on October 1, 2016).
First look at the ceilings set over the years.  Did Obama ever set one near 110,000 (set in Sept. 2016) for any of his years prior to his final months in office?
Until Obama’s last years, he didn’t come close to the CEILING in his first 4 years, see especially FY11 and 12 (it is a ceiling not a TARGET)!  Obama had two years under 60,000! Did the resettlement contractors complain and moan about Obama—NO!
Much is being made in the media about Trump’s March number (2,070) but who had lower months—both Bush AND Obama. See Obama’s October 2014. It is 1,810! March 2011 is lower too!

Is Trump’s April that far out of line from some of Obama’s months? NO! Obama had some months lower than 3,316!
Now have a look at the first 4 months for the last eleven years. Until Obama’s last months in office, have you ever seen the numbers so high in the first 4 months for all of the years? The Obama State Department began pouring refugees in at record numbers (in anticipation of a Trump slowdown?) and I bet they also skipped a lot of screening to get the flow going at that incredible rate.
Again look at the numbers!  Trump is on target for a just below an average year of about 60,000 admissions, but much to my shock the AP is reporting that Congress has granted enough funds for 75,000 this year!  75,000 would put the admission number ABOVE any year from FY2007 to FY2015!
So who is AP trying to kid?
 

 
Here are some snips from the AP story by Meredith Hoffmann which begins with a Somali sob story.  Why does no one ever ask how it came to be that this Somali man abandoned his family for seven years, got in to the US without them and left them to deal with poverty and war in Africa?
Besides the effort to make it look like numbers are “plummeting,” Hoffmann actually helps make the case why this program needs to be dumped or reformed.  The first thing that Congress must do is stop the per head payment to NON-PROFIT resettlement agencies who then whine and moan whenever numbers drop (like Kekic here!).  She also points out the many states that are trying to get out of the program. So where is Congress?

The family’s case illustrates how Trump’s travel bans have caused the number of refugees coming into the U.S. to plummet in the last two months, despite his executive orders largely being blocked in the courts. The number of refugees arriving in the U.S. dipped to 2,070 in March, which was a six-year low except for a period in 2013 when the federal government was shut down. The figure was slightly higher in April, 3,200, but it was still much lower than the months preceding Trump’s order. [Note that we pointed out above that Obama had a couple of months below 2,070! I don’t recall any crying and moaning then!—ed]

[….]

It can’t be turned on and off like a faucet because the NGO contractors then can’t figure out how to pay their salaries! This is why Congress must get these middlemen phony religious contractors out this business!

“This program simply can’t be turned on and off like a faucet,” said Erol Kekic, executive director of the Immigration and Refugee Program for Church World Service, one of the world’s largest resettlement organizations.

[….]

Conservatives praise the decrease but insist a total halt in admissions is necessary. Refugee groups say the drop has forced them to lay off employees while trapping thousands of people in war-torn nations, overflowing refugee camps and dangerous living conditions amid the world’s largest refugee crisis in modern history.

At the same time, Republican-controlled [state—ed] legislatures have been doing their part to limit the flow of refugees into their states.

[….]

The legal challenges returned the refugee cap number to 110,000, [No, see the chart above, it is in legal limbo—ed] but the slowdown from January to March and actions in Congress mean the U.S. will likely come nowhere close to reaching that number by the end of the fiscal year in October.

The U.S. is currently on pace for about 60,000, but a State Department spokesman said the agency was “not in a position to speculate as to the final number of refugees that will be admitted by the end of Fiscal Year 2017.” [Obama had two years under 60,000!—ed]

“Tickets were canceled, exit permits were canceled,” said Kay Bellor, vice president of programs for the resettlement agency Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services. “You can’t just turn around and say, ‘everybody get back on the plane.'”

Congress has approved a budget for only 75,000 for this fiscal year. A U.S. State Department spokesman said the country is now resettling 900 refugee arrivals weekly, to remain within that budget.

On this next point, this for me is the Trump test!
Trump has the legal right to set the arrival number for FY2018 at zero if he wants to. What number will he propose in September?  The other part of my personal Trump test is this: Will the Trump administration tell Congress (or lead Congress) to dump the law or do a complete legal re-write of the program?  If he does not do it this year, it will never happen!
AP continues….

And Trump can set his preferred limit for fiscal year 2018 — likely a steep drop from former President Obama’s 110,000, said Anna Greene, senior director of policy for U.S. programs with the resettlement agency International Rescue Committee. [It is maddening how this 110,000, nothing more that a wish from a departing president, becomes the number the program is expected to submit!—ed]

Resettlement agencies get paid per refugee, causing them to cut back once the flow slowed down. Church World Service cut about 600 of its 640 employees in Sub-Saharan Africa but later rehired some of them, said Kekic.

You can read the rest of the AP story by clicking here.

Jeff Sessions' Justice Department planning to ask for dismissal of TN refugee case; feds say they lack time to deal with it!

Gee, I wonder why they are so busy?  Of course, you would be living under a rock if you didn’t know that the Dept. of Justice recommended (and the President concurred) firing the Obama-appointed Director of the FBI, James Comey, yesterday.
I joked on twitter that the reason for the firing was because Comey admitted to Congress (without prompting!) that 300 refugees are in the pool of 2,000 cases being investigated by the FBI for reaching out to foreign terrorists.  See yesterday’s pre-firing post here.
In my opinion, in the long run, this Tennessee case is more important for the future of this country than anything to do with James Comey’s firing!

So why does the Trump Justice Department not have enough lawyers to handle a couple of big issues at once?

Now here is what The Tennessean is reporting yesterday about the lawsuit we watched being developed for years.  New readers might want to check this post when the case was filed in March for some background.

The federal government will ask for a dismissal of Tennessee’s lawsuit over refugee resettlement, according to document filed in federal court on Monday.

While seeking more time to file their request, attorneys for the Department of Justice said Tennessee lacks standing and “their claim is unripe.”

In March, Tennessee became the first state in the nation to sue the federal government over refugee resettlement, citing a violation by federal officials of the 10th Amendment. The amendment says the federal government possesses only the powers delegated to it by the U.S. Constitution, with all other powers reserved for the states.

The lawsuit argues the federal government has unduly forced states to pay for refugee resettlement programs.

The federal refugee act was designed to create a permanent procedure for the admission of refugees into the United States.

The lawsuit asks the court to force the federal government to stop resettling refugees in Tennessee until all costs associated with the settlement are incurred by the federal government.

In a brief response to the state’s lawsuit, federal attorneys say the state’s claims “lacks merit.”

Chad Readler, former Jones Day attorney, heads the Civil Rights Division responsible for the case. http://www.law.umich.edu/newsandinfo/features/Pages/ChadReadler_050917.aspx

Give me a break! Hire more lawyers if you can’t get the work done!

While explaining that they’d like until June 1 to prepare for their request for dismissal of the lawsuit, DOJ attorneys say they’ve been preoccupied with other matters.

“Defendants’ counsel have worked diligently to prepare their motion to dismiss, but due to the number and complexity of the issues, and the unexpectedly heavy press and urgency of business in other litigation for which undersigned counsel is responsible, Defendants require additional time,” the filing states.

Chad Readler, who has been involved in federal court cases related to President Donald Trump’s executive action on sanctuary cities, is among several attorneys for the federal government handling Tennessee’s lawsuit.

Continue reading here.
Silver lining….
The Thomas More Law Center does excellent work and if Trump’s Justice Department doesn’t keep the case out of court (as they appear to be aiming to do!) then a lack of knowledgeable and skilled federal attorneys defending the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program may be a good thing!
Always a very wild card these days is if the case is heard by a politicized judge!